


Wash Him Deep Where The Tides Are Turning

by RoryKurago



Series: Kurago [4]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Drowning, Gen, Jaegers (Pacific Rim), The Breach - Freeform, The Drift
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-25 05:47:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13827789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: “Sir, we’ve hit the Breach before. It doesn’t work.”June 2017: three Jaegers, six Rangers, and a submarine drop into Challenger Deep to navigate a thermonuclear bomb into Hell. It’s waiting for them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Last time I checked 'Xichi' the interwebs said it could be male or female, and you know my feelings on that, so female Xichi it is. I have many questions about how Jaegers are transported long-distance and whether or not Rangers spend the whole time plugged in. My instinct is 'no', because... well bathroom breaks. But we don't know. So: Idylls and meditation.
> 
> Unbeta'd, so suggestions/feedback are beloved!

_The Lord’s gonna come for your first born son_  
_(His hair’s on fire and his heart is burning)_  
_Go to the river where the water runs_  
_(Wash him deep where the tides are turning)_  
_And if you fall...._  
_And if you fall...._  
_Hold my hand_  
_Ooh, baby, it’s a long way down to the bottom of the river_  
_Hold my hand,_  
_Ooh, baby, it’s a long way down, a long way down_  
  
“Bottom Of The River” - Delta Rae

  
… …

Lo Hin Shen was just getting to the good part of his novel when the alarm dropped.  
In the temporary field office set up beside the Guam airport, there were no fancy holoscreens; the PA system wasn’t even wired yet. A plump LOCCENT officer sprinted up and then doubled over with hands on her knees, bathed in sweat half fear, half tropical heat. Shen sat in the office set aside for Horizon’s Rangers, boots on Xichi’s chair and the desk fan directed at his face. It was not quite six AM and already twenty-seven degrees Celsius. Across the way, sunlight reflected off Puma Real’s feet. Behind them: LOCCENT.  
Shen waited for the tech to catch her breath, a finger in the pages.  
“Commander Lo,” she panted in Cantonese. “There is movement in the Breach. We’re being scrambled now.”  
Well. It had to happen sometime.  
He withdrew his feet from Xichi’s chair and laid the book aside with profound regret. He had so wanted to know what happened at the end.

… …

Operation Vindler was a fuck-up from the jump. First, the PPDC had tried hitting the Breach with air-launched munitions; then they tried timed depth charges. Snake Eyes on all fronts. Vindler called for a three-Jaeger Strike Group to walk up and knock on the damn door.  
In preparation for this, sensors were installed in Challenger Deep to monitor the Breach. Three went dark with no Breach activity.  
The first shut off without registering movement in the water. The second, too. There were Air Group assets in the air before the third sensor blipped; a hail of temporary sensors floated into Challenger Deep like dandelion fluff, making up for quality with numbers.  
These began to bleat just as Shen was beginning chapter six of a light novel given to him by a man with whom he’d had the most fascinating conversations about _Live-Die-Repeat_ over cold tea in the Hong Kong commissary.  
The unmanned submarine advancing to scout the area was halfway into the Deep when the locale of the Breach began to heat. Electricity charged the water.  
Nothing had come through the Breach, Xichi told Shen as they suited up. Thermal jets frying them? Curious sealife?  
There was life down there besides kaiju, Shen mused without speaking. Xichi inclined her head.  
“Sir,” said one of the suit techs. She hesitated with his chest plate in her hands. “Do you think this is a good idea? Going ahead with Vindler in a rush like this? Shouldn’t we wait until after the kaiju has gone?”  
“Jenny, get that plate locked down,” snapped her supervisor.  
Jenny startled and then fitted the curiass into position. Shen looked to Xichi. Her eyes were closed. Her muscles tensed against the tremors of her armour ratcheting into place.  
“And what if it doesn’t go?” Shen murmured to Jenny when she returned with a vambrace. “What if they know our plan and this kaiju will be a guard? Or what if it does go, and it destroys a city?”  
“We could still drop more charges from a Navy Destroyer and re-route the Strike Group to intercept the kaiju.”  
“We could. But there’s one kaiju and three of us.”  
Jenny tightened the bolts on his vambrace, a line between her eyebrows.  
“We built the Jaegers to defeat the kaiju,” said Shen. She looked up and he smiled at her. “So let’s defeat the kaiju.”  
Jenny nodded crisply, breaking into a reluctant smile, and checked his joints.  
Xichi’s mind brushed ghostly against his: _bravado?_  
_Optimism._  
Xichi turned her head to let a tech resettle her circuitry suit collar. _Optimism is not our style._  
_Then call it… positive realism._  
It would be a rush job, yes. But there were three Jaegers and one kaiju. No kaiju, if they moved quickly.  
At six-twenty-eight, three Jaegers left Guam.

  
… …

After 2016, Rangers didn’t travel in the helos anymore; too many sudden drops and last-second scrambles to get pilots down to their Conns. Hanging in their cradles, Rangers kept the comms open to pass the time. In Rubicon Gambit, at the head of the arrow, Kracevski immediately picked up a conversation with one of his Pacific Islander crew about vegetable dyes and palm weaving.  
Shen tuned the Pole out and went about his ritual of double-checking Horizon’s corporeal feedback sensors and then dulling them for transit. It was one thing to feel themselves twenty-five stories tall and heavy, made of iron with a nuclear heart; it was another thing altogether to feel that way consistently for eight hours or more of immobility, dangling in the wind beneath the Jumphawks. Past experience had taught the PPDC that pilots who stayed fully cognisant for transit had duller reactions and slower reflexes. Jaeger became pilots less than pilots became Jaeger: ponderous, blocky, and slow. With integrated senses dialled back, they could simultaneously inhabit the Jaeger and the Drift without being sucked under by either.  
It was three hundred and some kilometres to Challenger Deep. Five hours.  
For some of it they slept, slack in the motion cradle. Xichi had it down to an art; she could sleep anywhere. More accurately, she could calm her mind anywhere. Shen withdrew to the world of his novel to pass the time. He had forgotten to ask a technician to pick up his novel for the trip. He tried to imagine an ending instead. In her dreaming, Xichi idly roamed his waking.  
_How far,_ her mind whispered.  
_A long way,_ he told her. Beneath their iron feet, the Pacific Ocean stretched to the horizon.

… …

Oceanographers found the Breach in Challenger Deep. Mathematicians determined the nature of the portal. Tacticians picked the payload.  
The PPDC was careful to pre-install a triad of sensors to keep an eye on it so no one started the party before the piñata arrived. Beyond that, a child could have written the plan. K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple, Stupid.  
Blow the Breach open. Blast the kaiju back to whatever kingdom they came from. Leave before the guard-dogs arrived. A sub (unmanned) to place the payload; Horizon and Puma to stand watch; retrofitted T-90 Rubicon Gambit to guard the sub. A long way to go, but a simple strategy.

  
… …

Xichi had several favourite retreats for transit—static Idylls encapsulating a moment, an hour, that Rangers were taught to construct into which they could fold their consciousness to re-centre and pass the time. The more constructive manifestation of rabbiting.  
The one she chose today was a favourite of Shen as well. Sinking into the Idyll, she ran up the stairs of a garden of orchids on a mountainside, damp-faced in the mist, to a greening stone bench where her fiancée had proposed to her.  
Shen stood in her wake. Not quite inside the Idyll but not outside it, at the top of the stairs looking down the valley into the gardens. This was the Garden of the Sleeping Giant outside Nadi, Fiji, where she had gone as a young woman to visit her aunts. For an unartistic woman, Xichi had a knack for vivid Idylls. Shen felt the mist beading on his neck and cheeks; he could hear water dripping from a thousand leaves and running down the mountainside. Later this afternoon, it would storm. She and her fiancée would shelter in the tea house near the car park, under a spreading fig tree, and the proprietor would bring them tea and English scones to celebrate their news.  
He slipped back to the surface. Less than an hour had passed.  
Vaguely, he was aware of the rest of the Strike Group drifting toward the Breach beside them.  
Ima Tätoba had stuck an Ondansetron wafer beneath his tongue before he even stepped into his drivesuit. Not lack of faith; he just hated air transfer. And heights.  
Belikó Tätoba always patched her iPod in to the Jaeger comms; on other days, Shen had heard flutes and reedy drumming, ululating songs in a language he didn’t know. Today, in the background of Ima checking in with Puma’s helos, he heard a swell of dramatic orchestrals and rapid-fire Spanish accusing a man of marrying a woman for her money. The cousins were catching up on their telenovelas.  
Shen wondered who was holding the phone or if the techs had taped it to Belikó’s gauntlet like they had a second dose of anti-emetic to Ima’s (where he could tongue it free closer to the drop). The Panamaians could multi-task, if nothing else.  
In her dreaming, Xichi rippled with humour. She nosed the surface like a fish. Satisfied, she sank. This time Shen followed.  
He stood again at the top of the stairs, looking down the pocket valley. Xichi came here often. It was one of the deeper places of her Drifting mind. Often she was playing checkers with her fiancée, or braiding creepers into crowns. Today she sat alone.  
Shen took her fiancée’s spot beside her on the bench.  
“You should have brought your book,” Xichi said mildly.  
“I forgot.”  
“You can finish it when you get back.”  
Shen pondered that. “The sensors detected nothing.”  
“So maybe there is nothing. A giant squid. A coelacanth.”  
“A thermal jet.”  
“A thermal jet. It isn’t as if the Deep isn’t mapped properly,” Xichi agreed. With hands folded in her lap, she gazed out at the fog veiling the view out of the valley.  
  
… …

The Poles were discussing what animal they would come back as if they died and were re-incarnated. The entire flight group was weighing in on the debate over open communications when Shen surfaced.  
Registering that he was again among the lively living, they addressed the question to him.  
“Hey Shen,” said Tekutyte, “you have reincarnation in your religion, yes? If you come back as an animal, what will it be?” His voice crackled, too serious for the question he was asking.  
Kracevski began to interrupt, to re-word his co-pilot.  
“A pangolin,” said Shen, simply because he knew it would confound them into another round of debate between themselves. Two hundred kilometres still lacked to the Deep.  
The Poles fell to arguing the psychology of pangolins and Shen fell back to his novel. He reviewed the first five chapters. What he knew of the characters, and the author. The likely twists.  
By the time Kracevski and Tekutyte had moved to the ethics of octopi, Shen had drafted the likely course of the novel. He began to play it through in his mind.

… …

Forty minutes from the drop point, he stirred himself and began to awake the Jaeger. An oblong red shape atop the sea grew larger and then flashed beneath them: the tanker base for the submarine. The brass ordered it withdrawn to a safe distance after the early alarm and the inevitability of nuclear blowback.  
“Sub’s en route,” trilled a voice inside his helmet.  
Shen was too deeply Horizon to startle. He tipped his head lazily to indicate attention.  
“It’ll rendez-vous at Beta co-ordinate, Commanders,” relayed the LOCCENT tech.  
“Copy, LOCCENT.” The voice belonged, Shen judged, to the woman who had run out the alarm call in Guam. He wondered hazily if their usual controller was on a bathroom break.  
“Twenty minutes to drop,” chimed Kracevski. “Time to wake the Beauty.”  
Ima burped over the end of the squawk. “Good.”  
Shen ignored this and descended into Xichi’s Idyll.  
She sat with a gently-steaming cup and saucer in her hands, crumbs between her sandals.  
“It’s time,” said Shen.  
Xichi squinted into mist as if trying one last time to clear it away. It swirled but stuck. She set the saucer aside. “All right.”  
They rose together. A quick trip through memories of raves and training camps and the waterfront devastation in Victoria Harbour to get into a killing humour and then they surfaced.  
As they ran through wake-up manoeuvres, dialling up Horizon’s feedback and charging her systems, reports from around the Pacific filtered through via LOCCENT. Other Jaegers were suited up and moving to positions in their protectorates. If something got past the Strike Group—  
_Thermal jets,_ whispered Xichi.  
_I have always admired your 'positive realism', Ma’am,_ returned Shen.  
“Would you like me,” she said aloud, “to tell you what happens in that book?”  
“No. I’ll read it when we get back.”  
“Horizon Brave,” hailed their lead Jumphawk. “We’re ready when you are.”  
“Copy, Albatross One,” said Xichi. “Horizon dropping.”  
She reached up and depressed the button.  
  
… …  
  
Shen had never become accustomed to the fall, though for Horizon Brave it was less than stepping off the low diving board at his high school.  
The sudden splash and resistance of water was always a shock. Cold sucked them down and closed over their hips, shoulders, head. Bubbles fizzed up their body.  
They sank through to clearer water. To their left, Puma had legs and arms locked straight like a bullet. Rubicon had fingers spread, twiddling them in the current like a child playing in a fountain.  
Mariana’s Trench bloomed below them like a wound in the seafloor. The lips of the trench gaped. Grew. Grey walls rose and swallowed the three whole.  
They landed with bent knees after an eternity of free fall. Sand plumed. Rocks shifted.  
When it all settled, they stood at the edge of long terrace. A dimly-visible landscape of sediment and pallid shapes melted into the gloom. The water pressed in—held them down, squeezed them like an overeager playmate. Shen said a brief prayer of thanks that the feedback sensors didn’t register heat and cold.  
The Group took a moment to acclimatise. Then they started to walk.  
“I will never get good selfie with this light,” said Ima, his voice insipid in the black.  
“We should not have let you join that stupid website. But we come back with fancy cameras and lights, _si quieras_ ,” said Belikó. “Take a nice Instagram for you.”  
The submarine emerged from the gloom to join them when they reached the edge of the terrace. Twenty tonnes of payload hung at its throat like a Saint Bernard’s cask.  
Kracevski clicked his tongue. “Come here, Fido.” Gambit’s fingers crooked at it.  
“ _Feliks_.”  
“Lolek,” Kracevski replied to his co-pilot in precise mimicry.  
Shen went through the process of integrating the submarine’s camera feed with Horizon’s. A new view popped up at his corner of the HUD—less defined than Horizon’s cameras. Looking through it made him feel bizarrely disjointed in a way that looking through ‘eyes’ on Horizon’s back or knees didn’t.  
“LOCCENT,” Xichi said smoothly, “we have the Orpheus Diver. Payload looks good. No visible damage or fault.”  
“Acknowledged.” The response as if from the top of a well. “We still can’t see anything down there, but Breach sensors indicate you’ve got twenty-five minutes maximum to get down to delivery co-ordinates, position the payload, and clear the blast zone.”  
“Copy that, LOCCENT.” Xichi’s voice was level. In the Drift, she shook.  
Horizon hung back to let the submarine slip in beside Gambit. Ears straining for the ping of radar and eyes on the HUD, Shen and Xichi turned to look down at the Breach. Soft light gilded the trench walls. Sparks were beginning to track a jagged line. At Gambit’s shoulder, the submarine whirred softly.  
“See? It’s like a dog,” said Kracevski, only half muted.  
“ _Zamknij się_.”  
“There is nothing there,” said Ima incredulously. Puma tipped forward the slightest bit as her pilots peered into the abyss. Front-lit in the dark, the Jaeger seemed smaller than above water. Her pilots seemed younger.  
Tekutyte made a sound his mike only half-caught and Gambit’s head cocked. “Didn’t you read the brief? It only exists when a kaiju is coming.”  
“ ‘ _Metaphysical anomaly_ ’,” quoted Kracevski.  
Horizon Brave nodded with her pilots. “Our goal is to place the payload and convulse the disruption zone as The Breach opens,” said Shen.  
Puma’s shoulder twitched as if turning to speak to something at her shoulder. “Before the kaiju come out,” said Belikó.  
“And before the Scalies close it,” added Tekutyte.  
“Then we had better get a move on,” said Ima. It sounded funny in his heavily-accented English—too quick and smooth amid the staccato phrases. Puma straightened.  
“Kaiju inbound in twenty minutes,” said Belikó. _Plus whatever’s already down here._ It was heavy in her pause. “Horizon, how you want to do this?”  
Xichi and Shen stare down at the impossible lightning beginning to arc through the water hundreds of feet below.  
“Follow the plan,” said Xichi. “Horizon taking left flank.”  
“Copy, Leader,” said Kracevski. “Let’s get this done. Gambit moving to centre.”  
“Acknowledged.”  
“Copy,” echoed Belikó. “Puma moving right.”  
Gambit’s radio chimed. “LOCCENT,” said Kracevski, “Rubicon Gambit beginning final descent.”  
“Roger, Gambit. Orpheus Diver beginning final descent.”  
Horizon stepped out along the the lip and Xichi and Shen tipped their weight away from it automatically, repelled by the drop. At the corner of the HUD, the submarine scooted out nose down. Xichi and Shen looked to its camera feed and took a moment to adjust to the vertiginous feeling of seeing the Orpheus’ camera descend while Horizon travelled horizontally.  
“So, Horizon,” said Tekutyte. Shen couldn’t stop his attention flicking to Horizon’s rear camera where Gambit was visible on the edge of the terrace as a shrinking blot in the haze. “Where’s this babysitter we’re looking out f—“  
A tail swept out of the black and knocked Gambit into a thermal stack.  
It caved under his weight. Rubble rained on Gambit’s Conn. Comet tails of sediment streaked the water. In the hollow far below, lightning arced through the water in a jagged smile as Horizon pivoted back.  
“We lost the element of surprise,” Xichi said firmly. “Lights!”  
“What the _fuck_ ,” shouted Tekutyte as Gambit’s full set of floodlights flared in tandem with Horizon’s. “ _What the fuck!_ ”  
“Where is it?” called Kracevski.  
“I see nothing on radar,” Belikó said in distress.  
“Changing to sonar,” said Ima.  
“Don’t," said Xichi. "We’re in a canyon; sonar will confuse you.”  
“Or it will confuse that thing!”  
“Where is it?” said Kracevski again. Gambit shook free of the debris and pushed out to open water, knees bent and fists raised. In the far distance, Puma Puma was a dark pillar indistinguishable from the thermal stacks around her but for the spotlights at her joints. At the corner of Shen’s HUD, the submarine continued to plug downward.  
“Horizon,” called Tekutyte, “go to Orpheus! We and Puma will cover you.”  
“You can’t even see it,” said Shen.  
“We are pawns, you are now queen. Protect the king!”  
“Copy,” barked Xichi an instant before Shen relayed,  
“LOCCENT, Horizon taking over as primary.” Horizon Brave made to dive. In their peripherals, grey broke from a stack and streaked toward Puma. It was too far for Horizon to clearly see, but - spreading impossibly wide - the kaiju enveloped Puma head and shoulders and took her to the ground. Sand billowed up. The cloud veiled an area taller than Puma.  
“ _Santa María_ ,” cried Belikó.  
Horizon pulled her weight back from the edge.  
Gambit was already moving. “We’re coming, Puma,” shouted Kracevski.  
“What the fu—” Ima broke off.  
“Puma, what do you see?” said Kracevski.  
“Nothing!” shrieked Ima. “It’s camouflage.”  
“Is like squid,” grunted Belikó. The dust cloud heaved. “ _No estoy seguro que sea kaiju_ — It’s—” A plume of sand shot out the side of the cloud.  
“Puma!”  
The kaiju loomed out of the cloud with arms spreading like a Hindu god, bone white now. Sighting the Jaegers, it hesitated then drew itself in.  
Shen and Xichi assessed in an instant: the sub was unprotected and the Breach was opening. Golden light spread across the camera feed at the corner of the HUD.  
Gambit intercepted it as it drew into itself to surge up and over them. It spread wide to accept him—and then launched itself like a torpedo at the last second. Gambit evaded the stabbing tentacle as it vaulted over him, and grabbed another. Reeling back on it like a fishing rod it, he dug in his feet.  
Xichi and Shen assimilated even as they pounded across the terrace toward the combatants. There was no way this kaiju was ever intended to make landfall. How long had it been here?  
“Where do you think you’re going?” crowed Tekutyte.  
The kaiju swung a full one-eighty and wrapped all its limbs around him. The momentum of it carried them both off the terrace.  
“Gambit!” Puma heaved up from the settling sand like a revenant, Ima’s arm at a unnatural angle. Belikó - her voice crackly and broken with busted comms - uttered a battlecry and Puma launched toward the lip. Ima keened in the background.  
“Puma, don’t!” Tekutyte shouted.  
“We’re going to electrocute it,” called Kracevski at the same time.  
Horizon Brave put on speed, straining against their motion rig. They reached the lip ahead of Puma.  
Gambit hadn’t fallen far—more a step down than a distinct terrace. Dimly, Horizon saw it: the great grey hulk of Gambit swathed like a forties starlet in white furs. They saw the water shot through with neon blue, and heard the Poles’ war-cries.  
The kaiju jerked. Waves of grey-red-brown-green and the kaiju electric blue flashed through it. It didn’t make a sound.  
The silence of it chilled Shen and Xichi to their marrow. The Drift shot through with long-tongued ghosts and the rubber monsters of silent films.  
The electricity went dead. The kaiju floated, motionless.  Shen glanced at the Orpheus’ camera. The Breach filled the screen and brimmed over.  
“Horizon—“ chirruped LOCCENT. Xichi and Shen ignored it.  
Tentacles still swathed Gambit’s torso. Backlit by the Breach, he rocked his knees under him. He bent as if to peel away and raised his arms to grab at the body behind his head.  
The kaiju came to life. Tentacles wrapped around Gambit’s uncovered joints, squirrelling into the gaps and wrapping his chest. Gambit stood up instinctually. He was momentarily locked in place with arms over his head as if about to swing an axe down into the rock bed. His visor - dark and incongruently small - faced directly through the water to Xichi and Shen.  
A chill ran down their spines.  
Gambit convulsed. His chest collapsed under the tentacles and he crumpled in like wet paper. His video feeds went dark.  
The Tätobtas’ shouts flooded the comms. Bubbles billowed toward the surface like a mushroom cloud.   
The kaiju slid free of Gambit. Released, he arced backward in slow motion and cascaded into the Deep: no more a Jaeger than a sunken wreck. Plumes of luminous blue trailed from his panels as he fell. Shen and Xichi had the sensation of something tearing away as they watched him fall.  
The kaiju rounded on Puma.  
“Horizon,” came LOCCENT—urgent, insistent, “Orpheus Diver has reached the Delta co-ordinate. Confirm.”  
Shen looked to the camera.  Hovering below the level of the opening Breach, it saw beneath the lightning to blackened stone, its meters registered spiking alien energy.  
“Visual confirmation, LOCCENT,” he said. “Orpheus is at delivery site.”  
“Copy, Horizon. Breach opening in under five mikes. Get there and defend the asset.”  
“Wilc—”  
A battlecry filled the comms. Puma was free-falling toward the kaiju, arms and legs spread like a parachuter. The kaiju billowed and streaked up to meet her. At the corner of the HUD, the Orpheus manoeuvred under the burgeoning Breach.  
Light bloomed out of the Deep. Shen and Xichi were momentarily blinded. As they blinked it away, the kaiju suddenly changed tactics and dived.  
Puma’s rear thrusters engaged. She dropped like a stone. Belikó’s sob cut clear through the Orpheus’ chatter. Puma reached for the kaiju.  
It arrested its dive and turned back, opening its limbs as if to receive her.  
Puma had spread her blades as she dropped but she was so small. She was never intended for head-on combat.  
“Don’t try to tackle it directly—” Shen shouted even as the kaiju reached up to embrace Puma.  
Spreading her arms, Puma tried to get a grip on the tentacle sliding around her.  
Horizon launched off the last terrace, body tipping forward, every inch sliding into the most perfect forward dive Shen had ever pulled off in all the time he spent with the swim team, perfectly streamlined, every bit of Horizon pulled in as tightly as her frame would allow. Horizon couldn’t use her blades from this distance and her cry-cannon had been modified for contact burns. They could hear the Tätobtas shouting, crying with rage as they hacked and slashed at the tentacles tightening around them like a cocoon.  
Metre by metre, Puma’s plates disappeared between ropes of slithering white. The kaiju seemed to be stretching.  
“Horizon,” cried Ima. Popping, grinding sounds filtered through the radio over the sounds of machinery; more through Horizon Brave’s hull.  “It is constricting!”  
Threadfine bubbles trickled from the clenching fist.  
“Horizon,” began LOCCENT, “Puma vitals are—”  
Belikó grunted and cursed. Blue spurted as something gave. Bubbles burst from one side like minnows. The white mass resolved into individual tentacles that shivered and slipped tighter.  
Pulling her arms back like a skydiver, Horizon fired a projectile at the thickest web of tentacles.  
As if sensing it was coming, the tentacles retracted.  
The missile detonated on Puma’s back. The concussion wave blew Horizon upright out of her dive. Air bubbles scattered and rose in a column of gold. Trails of luminous blue and black streaked the water.  
In the Drift, Xichi had one foot in her Idyll and one foot on the motion platform. She was with her instinctually, his eyes filled up with mist and green. He didn’t bother to pull her back as he tried to shake off the collision with the wall. Before them, Jaeger and Kaiju sank together.  
“LO… LOCCENT.” Backlit by the Breach, Puma spasmed as if having a seizure. “LOCCENT,” croaked Belikó again.  
“Go, Puma.”  
“The escape pods are—”  
“Pods are offline, Puma. What’s your back-up?”  
Puma was still falling, swathed in kaiju and falling faster as she filled with water. “Ima is unconscious. The Conn seal is holding, but…” Puma’s arms floated slackly from of the mass, trailing white like streamers. The hole in her back gaped. Tentacles tightened around it and then crept into the hole. The kaiju had repositioned itself below Puma’s chest. It was using her as a shield.  
Horizon was at the edge of her abilities at this depth. They pulled their arms in again and fell faster. Severed tentacles floated past the Conn, bumping the visor.  
An alarm chimed in the Conn. Shen looked to it automatically.  
“Horizon,” said LOCCENT, “your hull integrity—”  
Xichi silenced the chime. “We know.”  
Down was the only way. Down there were the Orpheus, the payload, and the kaiju. Down there were the Täbtobas and the Poles.  
Bunched beneath Puma’s chest like an incubus, the kaiju peered over her shoulder. At last they saw its eyes: twelve spots, glassy black, encircling its head like a crown.  
Fixated on Horizon, it looped its limbs through Puma’s joints. Shen’s stomach clenched. The kaiju flexed and ripped Puma apart like an action figure. At the bottom of the trench, the Breach opened wide. Golden light flooded Horizon’s Conn.  
In the war room, the plan had been to plant the explosive beneath the Breach, disrupting the energy flow that allowed it to open. But the Breach opened right above the Orpheus, longer and deeper than the scientists had predicted, and sliced off the top of it as neatly as cutting cheese. The Orpheus sank to the seabed unpowered and silent.  
Just beyond Horizon’s grasp, the kaiju slithered free of the pieces of Puma and streaked downward. Horizon tucked in her arms and extremities to follow without a conscious thought. A blip like an escape pod zipped past them. Both Shen and Xichi were halfway to pulling up and following it instinctually before they locked themselves in their dive. They had one mission now: protect the payload.  
Whoever had been their LOCCENT controller had been supplanted by Marshal Bae, cutting in from Hong Kong. “—ort, Horizon,” she barked in rapid-fire Mandarin. “ _Abort_. Orpheus is down. We’re going to blow the payload now. Abort, abort, abort.”  
But they were so close. Flickering just beyond their fingertips was the ghostly white fluttering like sheets on a line—the kaiju, now flushed gold with light from the Breach. Beyond it: the Breach itself—and the bomb.  
“Horizon Brave,” repeated Marshal Bae, “ _abort mission._ Clear the blast zone.”  
The Breach was an orange glow below them. The kaiju darkened as they drew near, taking on the shades of the crevasse. The Breach flexed and spread.  
“God,” breathed Shen.  
Black swelled out of the Breach like pus. The aperture spread to accommodate it.  
“Horizon Brave—”  
The second kaiju emerged rimed in orange like Venus rising from a volcano. The Category Four bulged up from the red and blotted it out. The white kaiju floated sentinel as its nest-mate slithered free, a midwife welcoming her charge.  
“—I’m sorry, Rangers—” said the Marshal.  
Xichi looked at Shen. The white mist of her Idyll billowed up in the Drift. It filled their eyes and senses. Shen could smell wet earth and mould. His face was wet.  
“—there’s no time.” A shrieking trill cut through the Conn.  
Horizon Brave locked her arms around the white kaiju and Xichi engaged upward thrusters just as the payload pinged.  
The world went bright, and silent and still.  
In the Idyll, Xichi reached out and took Shen’s hand. They sat on the bench in permanent afternoon: hazy yellow light, and white and yellow orchids bobbing from the stone walls around them. Mist beaded on a close-cropped beard and moustache Shen hadn’t had in years.  
“Would you like me,” said Xichi, “to tell you how it ends now?”  
Shen curled his fingers around hers. “Yes.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A change of tone, perhaps.

_He laughed under his breath_   
_because you thought that you_   
_could outrun sorrow._   
_Take your own advice,_   
_‘cause thunder and lightning give you rain._   
_Run an airtight mission,_   
_a Cousteau expedition,_   
_to find a diamond at the bottom of a drain._

\- “Magpie To The Morning” by Neko Case

… …   
  
Riding the kaiju like a boogie-board, Horizon was rocketed upward with the blast. Part of Shen recognised as if observing himself through binoculars that somewhere in that shockwave was the other kaiju. A wave of heat they felt even through their metal and insulation broke over them. Rivets went pinging around the Conn. The visor cracked like a gunshot.   
Pain whipped across the bridge of their noses, back around their skulls, and squeezed. Their arms and legs burned: parts of Horizon Brave projected from behind their shield. Were they still alive?   
Xichi’s fingers tightened on Shen’s.  
There was a buzzing in the comms that might have been speech, might have been spirits coming to lift their souls from the twisted body of the Jaeger. The Breach was destroyed. With it: the kaiju.   
They were free. They could leave.  
Very belatedly, fighting free of the soporific Idyll, they realised that the agony in their limbs indicated they probably weren’t dead. They also realised that their meteoric rise had halted.   
Maybe they had lost consciousness for half a second. Maybe more. But they were still very much in the middle of things. “Oh,” said Xichi mildly as a tug began behind her navel.  
“Shit,” agreed Shen.  
The pull strengthened and then they were dragged free of the jagged points of the wall they had been thrown into and sucked down. The void effect had thrown them up and into a wall, perforating their back; they were taking water. But they weren’t dead. Half-delirious, they rolled away from the kaiju as they went, and flailed for a handhold.   
Their arms came free of the kaiju slimed with blue that buzzed and stung beneath the scalding sensory feedback. The kaiju spun as they pushed it free to reveal its entire front half was burnt away. Glassy bones glinted in Horizon’s floodlights. Far above them, the black bulk of the second kaiju was a smudge, inert.  
Horizon’s fingertips caught a ledge. They held on. Half the sea sucked past them with a rushing boom.  
When the pull finally slacked off and stopped, so did the noise.  
No buzzing. No static. Even the whirr of Horizon’s heart trying desperately to process what just happened seemed distant: hiccupping and irregular.   
With difficulty, they rolled their ponderous metal body and turned to survey the damage. The black smudge was gone. Pulled back into the Deep, Shen supposed. Xichi’s mind stirred against his in the Drift—but wearily. Water trickled through their punctured mid-back. Shen partitioned the damaged compartments while Xichi shut down non-vital systems and transferred power to others. The machinery of their left arm was severely compromised; they couldn’t pull down with that hand.  
With greater difficulty than turning, they hauled themselves up one-handed and crawled onto the ledge. They didn’t have much time. Partitioning the leaking compartments gave them more, but even so… And they had so far to go.   
By luck, the ledge widened into a half-terrace. In perfect synchronicity they raised the searchlights higher. Halfway off the ledge so his right side dangled into space, Rubicon Gambit lay motionless and dark.

… …

They had no memory of clawing up out of the Deep, Gambit’s Conn loose in their hand. No memory of limping to the nearest shallow water, or collapsing on an atoll with their precious cargo at their hip. Waves lapped the faceplate.  
The helicopters came. They didn’t remember this.  
Four stretchers were lowered. They didn’t remember this.  
What they did remember was this: Kracevski’s blue lips before his body bag was closed. Whitecaps in green water as the Hawks’ rotor wash whipped the wavelets to foam. Screaming as they were cut free from their suits.   
What happened after that was lost in morphine and the _thudthudthud_ of a metal heart that was not their Jaeger’s.

… …

Shen was conscious enough when they reached Guam to climb out of the help by himself. He couldn’t walk, but he could stand to get to the wheelchair. As he lowered himself into with with a medic’s hand on each arm, he saw the door of a third Hawk thrown open. Belikó staggered out. She was swathed in a blanket. Below it dangled her circuitry suit like shed skin, and above it an oxygen mask distorted her face to something inhuman. She didn’t look his direction.  
A black bag followed her out of the helo.  
Dazedly she turned to follow it. A medic guided her into a wheelchair. She didn’t seem to notice the woman’s hands on her except to follow their directions. The procession of gurney, wheelchair, and cloud of blue-clad medics set off double-time down the runway and into the belly of a waiting C-130.  
The second Hawk opened its bay door to divulge a matching set of body bags. The Poles were lifted out by an honour guard and taken to the same plane while Horizon’s medics found a gurney for Xichi, who had retreated wholesale into her Idyll to process. Staffers scurrying around at the verges of the runway breaking down the mobile units for rapid departure took a moment from their tasks to form an honour guard between helos and Hercules. Shen watched the bags roll away down the tarmac between them: dominoes saluted by a gauntlet of stony-faced staffers.  
Dimly he registered that he and Xichi had started moving too, bound for the same plane. He saw the grieving faces around them remotely; the boxy silhouettes of the mobile units behind them like memories of another life. That small, sequestered part of him that never shut down wondered why the Rangers were being medevac’d immediately instead of stabilised in Guam first.   
“You’re lucky, bud,” said one medic to another when they paused at the ramp to wheel Xichi up it, “—getting the hell out of dodge before this big bastard gets here.”  
“Mm,” said the second medic, resettling the catheter in Shen’s hand.  
 _So_ , Shen thought. The second kaiju escaped. Whilst Horizon had staggered to the atoll, collapsed, maybe blacked out, the kaiju had circled and looped back. Followed the helos.   
So. Three Jaegers down, three Rangers down, and only one of two kaiju neutralised.  
 _Not precisely a rampant success_ , murmured Xichi. Tendrils of her awareness stretched out to him from the front of the cargo bay. _Come down with me. We have a long way to go._  
Shen let his body be rolled up the ramp, positioned, settled, strapped in. He wasn’t invested in any of it. The thump of the cargo door closing and sealing came as if through water. An oxygen mask was fitted to his face. Across the bay, Belikó peered over her own directly at the bag Shen supposed contained her other half. He supposed she hadn’t taken her eyes off him since they were pulled from the water. He wondered if she had blinked. How long it would take her to sleep.  
A woman in a white coat began to speak to him. Blank-faced, Xichi stirred her head in the same way he did as he answered, but her attention was far away. The second kaiju—the one that escaped. What did the readings say about that?  
Shen relayed this unconsciously to the medic, his mouth moving with Xichi’s thought.  
“Sorry?,” said the doctor, momentarily pausing. Her hands recommenced their activity. “Ah, Category Three. The largest so far.”  
 _Ah._ Xichi's response fluttered in Shen's chest like an exhalation.  
“Are we ready to go, Doc?” someone shouted from the cockpit. The doctor turned away to give a thumbs up. She retreated to her own seat.  
Shen closed his eyes and sank. Behind his eyelids brightened. When he opened them, he stood at the top of a flight of stone steps.  
“Well,” he said as he settled onto the bench.  
“Shit,” Xichi agreed. In her hands, a cup of tea steamed, black and fragrant of smoke.  
Shen’s body tugged as the C-130 rolled a semi-circle at the end of the runway and then accelerated. Across the cargo bay he could hear a medic sitting beside Belikó, instructing her to breathe. He counted her through each inhalation.  
Xichi tapped a finger on Shen’s hand to bring him back to the Idyll. A checkerboard now lay on the bench between them; the pieces were laid out so that Shen would play white. Xichi never felt that she needed the advantage.  
Whatever was about to happen, he, Xichi, Belikó, Ima and the Poles were out of it.  
Shen took up his first piece—Variation Eight of their gameplay. At least with the Breach destroyed, this kaiju was the last of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> se fini.

**Author's Note:**

> This seemed a natural place to end, but there's also more, so finish here or keep reading as befits your tastes on bitter/bittersweet.


End file.
